skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So if you've got a web app that sells widgets you work hard to get visitors to come to your app and sign up.

If your web app is really awesome, maybe 10% of the people who visit on any given day will sign up. For most of us, that sign up rate will look more like 5 or maybe 3%.

So that leaves 97% of your visitors leaving.

With retargeting, you add a code snippet to your source. It places an anonymous cookie in the web browser of people who visit with a unique ID.

You then create ad campaigns with the ad network hosting the code snippet. They have what's called a "real time bidding" platform that is plugged into various ad networks. it might be Google's network. It might be Facebook's network. And that real-time bidding platform can be given very specific instructions like "show these ads only to people with this specific cookie ID".

So then when you, the person who visited the web app and left without signing up, visit a web site with ads connected to the retargeting platform, your cookie signature is "spotted" and the retargeting platform bids aggressively in a 50milisecond auction to win that specific ad impression. That's retargeting.

So when you load web pages online, thousands of bidder robots are analyzing the information available about you through the browser, and deciding whether to try to buy that ad impression. It's like high frequency trading for ads.
Thanks for mentioning that, I had not heard the follow up. Looked it up, that just happened today.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/04/kixeye-fires-four-after-in...

Well good for them, that was the right thing to do. I hope the folks here that were attacking the victim get the news that the victim was not really fabricating the whole thing as they were implying.
The issue I have with Dyson Sphere's is in 1960 the idea of the singularity hadn't really been floated. I think it is far more likely that civilizations either die or upload.
Hell Yeah - Hacking at 50
> I feel sympathy for any employees who exercised their options at IPO

Why? People choose their alliances. OMGPOP and Zynga are both trying to cash in on fads without bringing much real value to the marketplace. Why should rank-and-file employees get more sympathy than the big fish running the show? They chose to do the jobs they did.
You have so little time in an interview to learn so much you can't afford to lose the time to both learn whether they can do FizzBuzz (or whatever other problem) and whether they can manipulate some language of interest, when you could be learning both

The purpose of an interview isn't to be abstractly "fair", it's to find the best candidates for the job. You choose what "best" is (which is to say, please don't put words in my mouth about "only interviewing for the exact skillset" or whatever... you choose what is best, whatever that is). My preferred approach is to give the problem, then let the candidate write in whatever language they choose. If they flail in their putatively favorite language with which they've putatively been working for 4 years... well... I've certainly learned some very important things in those few moments.
yup yup good game. very fun. good job.
My patent-pending three-question technical interview
HP business-level B&W lasers have, for the most part, stayed pretty good. Especially the older 4100 series, which is one of my favorite. Older B&W laser drivers were great, newer ones are usually still good.

For color laser I often go with Xerox, for inkjet AIO I go with Brother. I've had far too many multi-hour sessions dealing with HP AIO software and drivers.

HP standalone inkjet printers can be good, but it seems no one buys non-AIO inkjets anymore.
PlaceRaider:Virtual Theft in Physical Spaces with Smartphones
They still can deny entry, can't they?

As I understand it, the visa grants you the right to be considered for entry at the border. The final decision is with the border officer.
It's a personality thing. Some people work well with todo's, some people don't.

I work better with them.
* No possibility of SQL injection

* No possibility of XSS (generally, although perhaps unusual content modification via javascript could open up XSS avenues?)

* No possibility of obscure dynamic language runtime bugs
Getting To Know Your Hacker
NIP Tip – Safely Viewing the Source of Potentially Malicious Sites
> The empty string being falsey is... very arbitrary to me.

It's extremely useful in a lot of contexts. The basic logic is that an empty string is an empty container, and empty containers are false, so you can test for them more easily.
If you are a small company no one is ever going to get a statistically valid sample size that could demonstrate any bias. They can only discover that data if it were available. If they do a work-performance test on a computer and the results are not kept, and racial/demographic data is not kept about each of the applications and their performance, how can this ever come up? These sorts of concerns really apply mostly to government jobs and large corporations.
Awesome, another Knoxvillain on HN. I feared I was the only one.

Decent pay here in Knoxville isn't all that difficult, but you do have to hustle and build up a bit of a name for yourself before you can reasonably expect to pull in anything, and it won't approach SV rates. Oh, and you pretty much have to be a .NET developer, although there is some demand for Java and a tiny bit of demand building for Ruby and Python.

Feel free to drop me a line (email is in my profile) and maybe we can help each other out.
Only $1,000 difference? Makerbot's Replicator 2 is approaching triple this price at $2200. Makerbot is moving upmarket into the semi-proffesional market and abandoning the hobbyist and student market leaving an opening for sub-thousand dollar robots like this one.
Zynga’s financial troubles worsen, company falling faster than before
Clearing up some things about LinkedIn mobile’s move from Rails to node.js
I remember the dealership I bought my car from kept calling once every six months to see how things were going. After a few years, my transmission blew and I contacted them to take care of it -- very quickly I realized how little they actually cared about me and my problems
And then there's the real question for a blog - does it really need to be dynamic, and does it justify the additional costs associated with a higher quality server/higher complexity setup.
But a calendar is just a todo list where the items appear based on a date. Your position is inconsistent, in my opinion.
I use Jekyll+GitHub Pages for my personal blog. It works fine, but I recently started using Wordpress for my company blogs, and I prefer it quite a bit. I use WP Engine for my blog hosting now and my blogs rarely have problems under load now.
Earned 3m views from Front Page posts on Reddit in 2 mths. Check it out.
I was on the team at LinkedIn when we first wrote the thing on Ruby on Rails. Here's my writeup containing some more context:

http://ikaisays.com/2012/10/04/clearing-up-some-things-about...

While I'll freely admit v8 is much faster than MRI Ruby, the efficiency gains are likely more related to 1) the rewrite factor 2) moving to non-blocking 3) the fact that the original server ... um, needed love
I am aware of iter. The proposed claim to be defended is "commercial fusion power by 2040", not "there exists an international experimental project to figure out how to create a fusion reactor with a positive energy balance and an economic durability, neither of which we know how to do yet."
I agree. Their questionable ethics when it came to copying successful games really stifles innovation.
Old dog, new tricks: The $159 Kindle Fire review
Looks like a pretty weak offer. The relocation payment is very small. The pay in TN is quite a bit lower than I would expect given the cost of living. The crime rates are nearly double places like San Francisco. I can't find a list of the neighborhoods that the down payment can be used in. Are they even places anyone would want to live?
It is not clear to me how that is a contradiction. An uploaded civilization may still desire more computational power, and unless there's an infinite computation escape hatch in physics (and there is currently not even a trace of such a thing), that's going to involve getting more energy from the star. On an exponential growth curve, even improving your civilization's energy efficiency by a factor of a hundred quadrillion still only buys you a blip on the scale on cosmic time scales before you start wanting to expand again.
FedEx CIO Rob Carter talks real-time analytics
Of course, that means you spend at least thirteen full 8-hour workdays per year just shuffling your todo list.
Ooh. TIL.
It's a sad state when I figure the dealership is going to do everything in their power to blame me for damage that I believe to be a manufacturing defect covered under the warranty. Imagine my surprise when I took my car in when the rear end was making noise and they found the problem during inspection, and said that they would need to rebuild the entire rear end... but it was covered under the powertrain warranty without any question. Furthermore, they found the water pump was leaking a tiny amount and fixed that under warranty, too. And the inspection was free because they found warranty issues.

I feel depressed at how cynical I am sometimes, but there's no feeling like being wrong about something like when you expect someone to try screwing/blaming you to save money.
How the Internet will (one day) transform government
I find it's easier to use a fully hosted platform like Tumblr with a custom domain, but if you like Jekyll then GitHub pages is pretty awesome.

If you're using WordPress, install a full page caching plugin.
I love how Clay thinks society should implement git-like concepts into how we interact. Could it actually work?
Bitcoin: Monetarists Anonymous
I'm not surprised.

Everytime I see a webapp like this, I always wonder to myself "where's the click".

I dont see a future for SaaS that is not targeted at people directly forking money over for it.
No, You're not entitled to your opinion
You can still have sympathy for people learning hard lessons.

If you tell a kid "tie your shoes, honey," and he just takes off running, he could well face plant. If he does, you can still feel sympathy for him, and you can still be comforting. But you should also say, "Well, this is why keeping your shoes tied is a good idea."

Nobody's born knowing that delivering user value is the key to business sustainability, and there's a lot in American culture that teaches other lessons. If I judge by the people getting on the Zynga short bus, a lot of their employees are pretty young. Hopefully this is where they learn something about picking employers.
It's a different kind of pressure though.
That's interesting. I've never been refused for a TN application (have applied four times). And I'm not anyone special either, I just have printed credentials and have written the application letters myself (with approval from the U.S. company that hires me). In fact, one time when I was applying, the agent merely skimmed my write-up and we ended up talking about nothing for fifteen minutes.
Why would you want to force something on a child that young? Why would you want to basically indoctrinate your child with something?

How about, instead, developing reasoning skills and the ability to make their own decisions and then actually letting them decide what they want to do? Crazy, I know!
> "The excuse was I didn't have copies of my university degrees (I had transcripts showing the granted degrees)."

That's not really an excuse, that's a stated requirement. Not all border officers screen so thoroughly, but you should have had the original of your degree.

If there's one thing I've learned in dealing with work visas, is to not trust your lawyer. Most immigration lawyers I've seen are, to be polite, less than amazing at their work. Double check, verify everything they do.
"When you really boil it down to its implementation, FizzBuzz is something of an irritating program. I’m not sure how much the author of the problem really thought about FizzBuzz, but it turns out it’s difficult to express well with the tools available to most imperative programming languages..."

Nonsense.. you call a simple loop with a couple conditions difficult?
IIRC, if you already have a visa, you can appeal to an immigration judge at the port of entry. If you don't already have a visa (because it's granted at the border, you're entering via the visa waiver program, etc) there is no right of appeal, and the border officer has the final say.
The term "SEO" has taken on a stigma, which is why those who actually know how to rank correctly per Google's guidelines (which the article enumerates fairly well) are using different terminology to describe what they do.

There is still "flash" SEO, but rankings can easily plummet as quickly as they were gained. Honest SEO takes longer, but has staying power for obvious reasons.
ConteXtream Brings SDN to Wireless SPs with Grid Software
To be fair though, reversing a string is not the kind of thing a lot of people deal with - there's usually a library function. Now they should be able to puzzle it out, but if it takes them a moment I'd be generous because I at least put it into the box of "that sounds easy, but oh wait a minute it's slightly different from my usual dev pattern".

To put it another way - when I code it's rarely different from writing to me; code is simply an expression of thought. But when you ask me to do something that seems a bit artificial (reverse a string) it's like asking me to write a haiku - I can do it, but give me a moment while I count out my syllables.
The Illusion of “Facts”: The Problem with All Scientific Findings
This product looks incredibly similar to the one being offered by stripe.
Slideshow: The Unexpected Beauty of Data Centers
>If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that.

Wow, talk about some ableist nonsense.

Why is it so hard for people to understand that different productivity tools work well for different people? Letting go of the typical mind fallacy is a very important step in understanding how to take advice from other people.
Actually, we aggressively cached, which led to weird things happening. I posted a follow up about this explaining more context - I hope it gets voted up.
Chrome user on Debian (Version 21.0.1180.89).

When I load it in a normal window and click "Find a match" nothing happens. In console:

> findMatch failed: CHANNEL_REQUEST_ERROR: 'BROWSER_WS_ERROR: WebSocket.readyState 3 != WebSocket.OPEN'

When I try to load it in an incognito window:

> XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://pk-cdn.prod.artillery.com/powderkeg/21/Scenes/MainMen.... Origin http://powderkeg.artillery.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.
This is all done on http://teespring.com/

The font is Helvetica
It does actually leak information in the form of ad prices and view rates. Not directly to he public, but it is leaked.
The thing is, it's really good. They do one thing but they do it really well. Saved me a ton of time and measurably increased the number of fully completed profiles on SetForMarriage.com.
You just compared Zynga/OMGPOP employees to 5-year-olds who don't know better than to tie their shoes.
Marketing Thinking for Startup Guys (and total world domination)
I'm really glad to hear this argument for open source, and doubly so to know you plan on voting with your money. I'm looking forward to the Firefox OS, I hope it gets a ton of traction. I'm pretty sure I'll be getting one too. Cheers.
Most of time, interns have to pay respective company!
Explain. If you can't produce a god damned string reversal function in 10 minutes, why would I believe you can produce a bug fix to your own, complex code in a few hours? That's what interviewers are considering: the interview is a proxy to see if you can come close to the requirements of the job.
In my experience, a happy team, is a good team. We tried a lot of different interviewing tactics and had hit or miss results. Now our interview is just going out for beer or coffee with the candidate and bullshitting for a few hours.

If they aren't smart or not fun to hang around with it usually comes out in those few hours. We've had 100% success rate.
How can I kick ass in the job I'm at right now?
I'm a student aide in a campus library, for 3 hours in the evening, twice a week. My job is called "peer support", and my responsibilities are somewhat fuzzy. The job seems to be resetting people's passwords if they forget them, helping them do hanging indents for MLA style, and explaining what happened to the document that they thought they saved.

I am explicitly forbidden from doing anything that falls under the job description of the union employees, so I can't:
Help people find books
Sign out equipment
Repair computers
Install software

All I can really do is sit at a desk, undifferentiated from every other desk in the library except for my small sign, and wait for someone to ask for help. In two shifts, I've had one client.

I suggested that I should walk around and ask if people needed help, but they said that another student aide tried that, and he "creeped people out".

So, what do I do to excel at this job? Or should I just give up trying and stick to my homework?
It was a huge gain because the original Rails servers were running on single threaded Mongrel and blocking on cross data center IO.
I picked an obvious example that made it clear what I am talking about.

Nobody knows everything. We all have lessons to learn. We all die with many lessons unlearned. Refusing to have sympathy for suffering just because the cause of the suffering is obvious to you is bad for everybody. Yourself included.
Presumably this isn't entirely unexpected, and the 'torching' comment is over the top. Microsoft wrote off $6.2B of their AQuantive purchase in July, assuming 2000 days (5 years plus a few months) that is $3.1M per day, roughly 6x the 'torch' rate in this article.

The stock price was already valuing them a lot lower than their pre-OMGPOP buy so this seems more like a recognition of that in order to make their balance sheets look a bit more credible. I had stock positions invested for a while in Activision (90's) and Vivendi (early 2000's) and generally they seemed pretty random. A hit and the price would rocket up, a flop and it plummets down. That suggested to me that a 'fashion' stock (where the product was as much fad/fashion driven as it is quality/non-quality driven) is really only good for trading, not for longer term growth. Got out of both positions at a small profit but a lousy return.

Contrast that with a company like Milton Bradley though, which milked the Monopoly game concept for millions if not a few billion dollars. It seems like games are more like 'books' or 'music' or 'movies' than something more durable like a 'word processor.'

The treatment Zynga getting re-assures me that we aren't in a bubble, in spite of what some would say (although not so much now, which is nice).
Runs like ass on my nexus 7 and galaxy nexus
Here's something that I believe, should be included in dev tools: Click on a node, and see all event handlers that are attached to that node (and those attached using jQuery).

Does anyone know if this is possible using Dev Tools? There is a bookmarklet Visual Event2 (http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/article/Visual+Event+2) that does this, sort of; but it is still lacking.
I've just fixed the 'blank' sign-in bug.
The Ruby example that you recommending hiring because of, is overkill. Here is a better Ruby example:

(1..100).each do |i|
o = ""
o.concat("Fizz") if i % 3 == 0
o.concat("Buzz") if i % 5 == 0
o.concat("Bazz") if i % 7 == 0
o.concat(i.to_s) if o.empty?
puts o
end
Or more likely, a PE firm would saddle the company with debt to pay off the new owners' debts, lay off everybody with any know-how, make an inept attempt at reinventing the now low-morale company, then give up after a few years and go into bankruptcy selling it off for parts leaving a pile of bondholder and pension lawsuits behind while management moves on to their next glorious MBA adventure.
Benchmarking mobile maps
> also has energy alternatives

What's an "energy alternative" ?
65 and coding harder than ever. All the things I have wanted to do for years are now becoming easy.

It's not that I am getting any smarter. There are so many new tools and so many new techniques with thoughtful discussion to back them up, that creating cool new stuff is becoming a piece of cake.

My world is all about 3D.

WebGL and libraries like Three.js are breakthrough tools.

Stuff that would have taken weeks to code gets dashed off in hours.

I would not stop coding even if you paid me to stop.

It's way too much fun right now!
By Square, I think you mean?
Coming from Rails, Node is like opening a toolbox and finding it has a screwdriver, a wrench, and a hammer. Somehow you're expected to build things with that.

For those that love to build things from the ground up or to carve out new solutions, Node is a great place to be. I think it's got enormous potential and is biggest opportunity since Python and Ruby took off around years ago.

Just don't think because you can create the same sorts of apps with Node that it's as easy.

Ruby on Rails even three years ago was laughable compared to today's toolset. Node is catching up quickly, covering ground faster than Ruby ever did, but still lagging.
IBM’s Big Data University seeks to close analytics skills gap
> Jeff is doing it wrong. A to-do list should be for things that you need to do, not thing that you'd like to do some day.

Please. I think a certain amount of humility is called for when making claims about how someone ELSE could improve his or her productivity.

For example, in my own practice (and contrary to the above), a to-do list has the most value to me precisely for things that I'd like to do someday, and not things I need to do now. This is because I need the list for things that tend to float out of short-term memory. I don't need it for immediate or high-priority tasks, because I tend not to forget those. People are different.

It's absolutely a fine thing to say, "This practice improved my productivity. I offer it to you, for your evaluation, in case you find it helpful, too." But even if 95% of workers are more productive with practice X, maybe I am a member of the 5% minority that is more productive with practice Y. It is silly to assume that given various ways of approaching a problem, there is ONE way that will better for 100% of people .

Being a professional means I own the responsibility for deciding how to accomplish something. Sometimes a group needs to reach a consensus on how to do something, e.g., pick one source code control system, rather than letting each programmer pick whichever they think makes them individually most productive. But choosing a personal to-do list is personal decison.
Then is it safe to assume that you disapprove of their like-counter-increasing when you share a link on facebook? It appears they do then too, and you may be sharing it to say "I hate this".
They won't necessarily go out of style, as a compute engine its not like you won't need to compute. The challenge with older hardware is when it costs more to run it than you can return in cash, but if you notice Amazon hasn't been discounting EC2 time as their cost of compute has gone down, so after they have depreciated all the hardware this stuff will still be useful for turning electrons into cold hard cash :-).
Since they show up in gmail while you're "on the record", I would assume so.
Companies doing "important" work have never gone out of business?